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Several weeks ago I did a post about an underappreciated quality essential to long-term executive success – resilience – given the likelihood of failure at some point in one’s career. The idea was: How we deal with failure can shape the rest of one's career. One of the points I made in the piece was that it’s sometimes said in the sports world that the most successful athletes are those who recover most quickly from disappointment. I can think of no better example of this than the recent case involving Mariano Rivera.

Two days ago, Rivera, the New York Yankees’ closer who is widely considered one of the greatest pitchers of all time, tore the ACL and meniscus in his right knee in a freak accident shagging fly balls as part of his normal conditioning before a game. He was carted off the field in great pain. He’s 42 years old, and the general assumption (which I totally shared) was that, given his age and the difficulty of returning from such a devastating injury, his career was over and it was an awful shame to see it end like that. The night of his injury, he fought back tears when discussing his knee and his future.

The dejection didn’t last long.

Less than 24 hours later, Rivera was back in the Yankees’ clubhouse, on crutches with his knee heavily taped, smiling, laughing, entirely upbeat and looking forward to the future. “I am coming back,” he told the New York Daily News and other reporters. “Write it down in big letters. I’m not going down like this.”

If the rehab ahead were long and uncertain for someone already farpast the normal age for baseball retirement, Rivera showed not a trace of concern. “Yesterday I was a little down, sad,” he continued, “because I was thinking of my teammates. I wasn’t even thinking of myself. I was glad it happened to me and not to one of my teammates. I can handle this.

“God gave it to me, I can handle it. Again, when you’re a positive man, you don’t want it any other way. You deal with it. That’s what adversity is. Deal with it.”